9 ms·

Don't Blame a 'Skills Gap' for Lack of Hiring in Manufacturing

75 points by _delirium 10y ago

theandrewbailey 10y ago
> Companies, the authors write, “are unwilling or unable to solve their skill challenges through internal training, even for skills that are highly specific to a particular plant.” That's true for all companies. They don't want to spend the money to train, since employees can (and often do) leave after just a few years (if not months), but are also unwilling to make the workplace a more desirable one.
- Bahamut 10y ago
  It's pretty sad, as the solution is staring at them in the face. These are the companies who refuse to adapt.
  - collyw 10y ago
    Sounds just like the IT industry.
  - lj3 10y ago
    It's not that simple. The economic situation on the ground is that anybody making less than $70k a year is better off on welfare. Factory workers make less than half that. Who would willingly train to do a hard, monotonous job when they could sit on the couch doing nothing and get paid more?
    - rubidium 10y ago
      Reality check (no idea where you live... but your blithe statement reveals some serious lack of understanding of the situation of most people in the US): The U.S. Census Bureau reported in September 2014 that U.S. real (inflation adjusted) median household income was $51,939. Making $50k a year is WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY better than being on welfare.
      - mcguire 10y ago
        "...median household income..." That's also very likely two paychecks.
    - theandrewbailey 10y ago
      There are many places in the US where making $35,000/year would make you rich, or at least well-off and comfortable. Many of them don't want to live in metropolitan areas and are completely happy.
      - rubidium 10y ago
        As a single person, yes you can live very comfortably on 35k a year (I wouldn't quite go so far as "rich"). Raising a family, not so much.
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  I remember in the 90s you could walk into into an interview and they would say "You are a smart guy, you'll learn it". I got a C++ job based on the fact that I was really good with PL/1 and FORTRAN. No way you could do this today. People wouldn't switch jobs that much if they actually saw a path forward inside the company. Just give them a some raises and actually reward seniority. From my managers I sometimes get the sense that anybody who has worked under them for a few years is spoiled goods and needs to be replaced with fresh outside blood.
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    I got my first job out of undergrad programming device drivers, having never programmed a single device driver before in my life. I skimmed whatever the 90's version of "Device Driver Programming for Dummies" was, on the flight to the interview. That scenario must seem ludicrous to job applicants today. Today, unless I had 5 years experience programming device drivers and could traverse a binary tree on a whiteboard, I wouldn't have the slightest chance at such an entry level programming job.
    - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
      I got a job that involves writing device drivers just last year. Our firm's only technical interview question involves time-space tradeoffs in embedded systems. Meh.
- gregpilling 10y ago
  it is not true for all companies. It doesn't take much thinking to realize that if you are a business owner, running a factory, and your competitors factory doesn't train then you would have an advantage by training. We do lots of training, because nobody has the skills for our exact setup. I have paid for plenty of training that walked out the door into a new job 6 months later. Life goes on. I look for high intelligence people, and then train them in house. High intelligence people can get trained in a fraction of the time, and not every high intelligence person went to college to become a programmer. I think the skills gap could be more about the draining of intelligent people from blue collar jobs. I went to high school in the 80's and there was a very strong push for "college/computers good, working with hands bad" message from the guidance counselors. I have a person who just graduated from University with good grades in Psychology and English. She applied for 87 jobs from March to July with no luck; now she is one of the robot operators. She says she makes more money doing this than any job she could get with her degree. Perhaps some of the skills challenge is too many white collar path people, not wanting to go to manufacturing for any reason. (my good worker is heading to grad school in a few months though, sad for me).
  - r_smart 10y ago
    This is an interesting point. I used to have one of these blue collar jobs (several actually), and you're pretty spot on. In addition to the disdain for this kind of work, there seems to have also been a shift to an idea of wanting to derive fulfillment from work. That seems obviously good, but my experience, working in a factory was in some ways more fulfilling. The work itself was not terribly demanding, and so I could do a good job while not tying up much of my mental resources. This left my mind free to wander, and I would write stories, review music theory, and otherwise ponder life's mysteries while performing my various functions. Then, when I got home I was well equipped with ideas and still had plenty of energy to dedicate towards my more intellectually demanding hobbies. I'm not saying it was heaven on earth or anything, but it offered a certain satisfying simplicity, and made self-actualization easier outside of work. Nowadays, I get home and struggle to find mental energy for side projects or writing. The work is better, and I'm wealthier, but I'm not sure that my life is richer.
taneq 10y ago
> The manufacturing industry has become so specialized that companies are looking for hyperspecific skills that few outside workers could be expected to have. I've seen this in action. A company hires someone, that person bounces around the company picking up various skills, roles and responsibilities. Time passes, that person leaves the company, and the company looks for a replacement, completely ignoring the fact that the role and the employee who filled it grew organically together over the years, making it impossible to find a drop-in replacement. They then complain that there's a skills shortage because none of the electrical engineers applying for the position are proficient with both graphic design in Corel Draw, and operating the shop's CNC lathe.
- larrydag 10y ago
  ITT closing down doesn't help. There definitely seems like a need to fill technical certifications.
  - mox1 10y ago
    The article talks about this, and claims that most of these jobs don't require certifications. They basically require plant specific on the job training, which for whatever reason companies aren't providing. It's similar to the tech industry where jobs ask for 10 years of node.js experience, 15 years of Coffeescript and advanced linux kernel knowledge....If you need that person, your going to have to train him.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    Which ITT certificates are difficult to find at other schools? (Like community colleges and so on)
- badsock 10y ago
  I remember the 90s, when it seemed like every time a CEO announced a big layoff, their company's stock price would jump. It struck me at the time as being fetishistic - it didn't seem based in the reality of the company's situation, it was just a way to demonstrate a machismo that everyone had decided was a sign of good leadership. It was when the term "right-sizing" was coined, and Al "Chainsaw" Dunlap was the model CEO. It felt like it was a breaking of a social contract: that a company would use their coffers rather than payroll cuts to ride out bad times, and you stuck around for at least 5 to 10 years, maybe your whole career. Then it became clear that they were more than happy to lay you off if it gained the company even a small temporary advantage. Fast forward to now, when it's understood that if you stay somewhere more than 2 years, you're harming your earning potential. And at the same time companies complain that by the time they train someone up, they're out the door. Well, you reap what you sow. I clearly remember that employers were the first ones to drop their side of the deal.
FussyZeus 10y ago
We have more than a few factories in our area offering barely $40k for incredibly specific skillsets involving various types of machines, totally unwilling to train. This is actually a really good explanation for how so much of the technology in the Warhammer 40k universe is unknown and worshipped; nobody was willing to train anyone on how it worked.
- r_smart 10y ago
  On topic: $40k seems pretty decent for an operator, though with training. Off topic: I'm still new to WH40k (started running a Rogue Trader game), but my impression is that the tech ignorance was a mixture of a psuedo-religious cult seizing control, information lost in the many wars, and the intentional intellectual poverty of the populace that keeps them docile.
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    > On topic: $40k seems pretty decent for an operator, though with training. Depends. Any mention of a dollar figure must include the region in the US, or it's totally meaningless. A 40K salary could easily be really good, really bad or normal.
    - r_smart 10y ago
      Yeah, I realized that after I posted my comment, and should have probably gone back to edit it. Thanks for pointing it out.
    - FussyZeus 10y ago
      That's true and even I don't have a point of reference as it's not my industry, it's just a regular feature of our local papers to have the local businessmen complaining about the lack of workers. I checked out the job listings out of curiosity. Whatever the case, apparently it's not enough since they can't attract people who are willing to work for that wage.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  If we're comparing our own training and education systems to the Cult Mechanicum, then I think we need to train everyone to a higher level in everything. In fact, more radically, we need to reform intellectual property law in a way that incentivizes making institutional knowledge into publicly recorded knowledge.
danvoell 10y ago
The biggest "gap" in manufacturing is the wages gap. Most new jobs in manufacturing require less skills than a Walmart greeter. They either stand around and press a button or stand around and pull a piece of plastic off a part. Manufacturers aren't willing to pay much more than $MinimumWage per hour for this job. The people who apply for these jobs are just a revolving door that cycle through all the local manufacturers once they get bored. And then manufacturers complain because they can't find someone who wants minimum wage and wants to press a button for the next 30 years and is dependable. They cite "work ethic". Technology and capitalism are the only one's we can blame in this situation.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- djschnei 10y ago
  "Blame technology and capitalism"? Are you advocating that a higher minimum wage would fix this? How exactly would pricing labor above it's actual value cause MORE of it?
  - dpritchett 10y ago
    If these manufactured products can't be brought to market without the button pushers, the value of the button pushing is almost certainly higher than minimum wage.
    - r_smart 10y ago
      In which case the minimum wage is unnecessary. I had one of these button pushing jobs (well it was more complicated than that, but still not demanding), and was paid well above minimum wage.
      - djschnei 10y ago
        Exactly where I was going to go. Economies are about allocation of finite resources (labor being one of those). If a company is so poorly ran that it can't determine the correct price it's willing to pay for labor through cost-benefit analysis, I'd rather it not exist. Politically, we have a thing for making it harder for bad companies to fail.
Manupok 10y ago
You would think it would be the manufacturing plant that’s off by itself in the middle of nowhere that doesn’t have access to a pool of skilled labor — but it didn’t turn out that way.
a_thro_away 10y ago
Programming machines. Recently a factory robot crushed a woman against a wall when she entered its work space. A closed casket funeral. If there is a need to program a machine, who is responsible if there is a safety issue involved? or even identifying there is one? The factory worker only trained to program? The supervisor, with infamous pressure to get and keep production running?... BTW, according to CBS, State regulators suggested a $7000 fine(!!!), and said a lockout device could have stopped it.
- gregpilling 10y ago
  I own a factory robot welding cell. It has triple redundant safety systems. To make it operate while human accessible, you have to activate the safety interlocks on both doors, pull the triggers halfway (but not all the way) on the teach pendant, and then the machine will only move at 10% speed. Even at 10% speed, if the robot turns and the cabling on it swings around, it can give you a good hit (from the welding cable on top). Would not be fatal, but it does give you a good whack on the head (I have experienced this!! haha). Also, machine operating and machine programming are totally separate jobs. Programming is very high skill level, and operating is fairly low - my 9 year old son and his scout troop spent one night operating it to get their robot badge. Why did the woman enter the work space, and how did she turn off all the safety devices? That would take a fair amount of effort on my machine, to get inside it while it runs. It could be done if you really tried, but it would take some effort. As for training - nobody, and I mean NOBODY, has had the skill or training to operate that robot in the 9 years I have owned it. The operators were all trained by me, the factory owner. And while I have lots of pressure on me for production, an industrial accident will destroy that. Better safe than shut down by OSHA.
  - a_thro_away 10y ago
    I understand the separation of programming and operating, as I am a programmer as well as having studied automated automotive valve welding and grinding at a leading supplier (friction stem and seat welding, among others). The point I was making, though probably not clear I admit, was that a factory operator could be seen as a "machine programmer" simply because they were given that title by the production owners, and trained on the job as such. For example, technicians regularly do electrician functions in large factories, and all safety and liability issues that arise with that. And, not all factory robots are contained in an enclosure, they are in free 3D space; what interlock would you suggest to keep a human out? Visual, ultrasonic? I simply ask who takes responsibility for general machine programming Safety if there is not a simple enclosure interlock situation? BTW, she didn't get by an interlock; apparently there was not one there - which is my point exactly. BTW, a previous fatal incident the proposed fine was <$100k, not a shut down - that doesn't seem much of a disincentive to me.
randomgyatwork 10y ago
It seems like what they really want is someone with twice the skills for half the pay. My friend's dad always told me it was hard to find people to hire, but he also said to hire someone he'd need to be able to make 3x what they cost to keep around.
- gregpilling 10y ago
  3x is the low end. I try to keep my factory at 6x . When you try to run at 3x, then you may drift down to 2x or less. If you aim for 6x, then you survive fine when it drifts down to 4x, and you are doing great when it goes up to 10x. I think that people who aren't employers can lose sight of the fact that some people are actually worth negative money per hour. Some people, even at $8.05 per hour, are not worth even that. Others, like the mythical 10x programmer, are worth 10x the high wage you pay them (or more). A huge variation. Example. Joe makes $8.05 sweeping the floor. Joe is not very diligent with his work, and sweeps some aluminum dust and debris into a pile of iron dust and debris, accidentally creates thermite and sets the corner of the factory on fire. This now costs in one day what Joe would have made in a year (this actually happened to me, last month. Thanks Bryan for putting it out). Example 2 (another true story! a good friend's company) Roy is drilling holes in a hydraulic press, actually in a dozen hydraulic presses that are all sold and need to ship. He breaks the 1" drill bit he is using, and undaunted and unwilling to tell anyone, he replaces the 1" bit with a smaller 15/16" bit and continues drilling. The presses ship out, all 12 of them, very heavy and with high shipping costs ($800 for the press and $200 for the shipping), and they get delivered to the customers. Yay! A hard busy week, but it all went out! Yay! bonuses for everyone! Then next week the phone starts ringing and it is discovered that all 12 presses are not unusable - the hole is too small to fit the piece that goes into it. All 12 presses come back, shipping borne both ways by manufacturer, and the presses are scrapped and replaced. Roy caused over $10,000 in losses for a very small company in exchange for the $300 dollars in pay. Roy was worth -$250 per hour that week. Negative $250 per hour. Of course we want twice the skills for half the pay. I would settle for twice the skills for twice the pay though. It is just so hard to find the "twice the skills" part. I would be delighted to find 1x the skills, even that is hard. When you find the person with 10x the skills, I recommend making it so they never want to leave. Equity in the company (or a cage of some kind in the basement, LOL)
davidf18 10y ago
If this article is correct, if firms aren't flexible enough to train workers with specific skills if they can't find anyone with that skill set that suggests that the firm is not filling jobs it needs and thus not as productive as it should be increasing shareholder value. That means that there is bad management and the board which represents shareholders should dump the current management and find management that is focused on doing what it takes legally to improve shareholder value.
- jawbone3 10y ago
  Why stop there? The only reason the board has accepted the bad managment is because the shareholders provide poor oversigth! The company should be confiscated and then sold at an auction to a select group of responsible shareholders!
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  Take the cynical view and recognize that this isn't a totally free market. Everyone has an incentive to kick back and let someone else solve the problem. Paying for training is usually a crappy deal, because someone else can use the same money to raise wages and steal your trained workers. You can address this with things like repayment-required contracts, but that's ugly and difficult for most jobs. Plus, you've got a better option: get it for free! So yes, you operate at slightly lower efficiency, but it's not because you're dumb. Instead, you're hoping that someone else (a competitor or ideally the government) will train up some employees you can then hire. Ideally, you get the government to push a career-training program in your desired field, producing a glut of specialized workers who not only don't need training, but keep wages down because they're only skilled in one specialized field. In which case, the management is perfectly sensible and 'sticky' wages in the face of a hiring gap make total sense.
  - davidf18 10y ago
    Well, it makes the appearance that they are not employing and training people that are working to maximize shareholder value. The explanation that you present seems interesting but too complicated. If they lack employees and need to train them in order to improve productivity and thus shareholder value they should do this. I think there is a lack of transparency to shareholders that understand their management is lazy/incompetent. Also, in the article, it would be helpful to have the journalist interview some firms and ask them why they don't train people if they can't find them. Make it explicit.
mcguire 10y ago
"Another possibility is that what companies mean by an “opening” has changed — that in an age of online job listings, automated résumé screenings and increasing temporary and contract work, companies are posting more jobs than they ever expect to fill. There’s some evidence for this: Recruiting intensity — a measure of how hard companies are trying to fill open positions — remains below prerecession levels in both the manufacturing sector and the economy overall." That is an interesting theory. Unfortunately, the abstract of the referenced paper doesn't seem like the paper mentions much evidence. Also, my limited experience makes me doubt manufacturing companies are throwing out job openings willy-nilly, trolling for applicants. (In non-blue-collar jobs, sure.) On the other hand, the current environment would seem to make it easy to overestimate the number of openings.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  My experience suggests that this theory is dead on. Less because companies are putting up more openings, and more because the meaning of "posting an opening" has changed in a way that causes overcounting. When Verizon wants a floor-sales clerk, they're likely putting the opening up on Monster, Indeed, and several other sites besides. That's 5-6 "openings posted" for one actual job, and it's made even worse if they aren't quick to take down the postings (why bother? you just route the resumes to spam). 30 years ago, you were posting a single job in specific places, and job boards or newspaper ads would turn over 'naturally' if you didn't keep the posting active. So I don't know how important it is, but I'm definitely assuming that postings are being multiply counted these days.
  - wott 10y ago
    And what you mention is just a multiplication of posting of the same job post. But there is also the case that more and more work is subcontracted. So you can find posts that are slightly different but all refer to the same job position: 1 by the company where the job will take place, 4 by different subcontractors, and 3 more because 2 of the subcontractors have themselves subcontracted the job.
    - 10y ago
tboyd47 10y ago
> Weaver and Osterman offer a more industry-specific explanation: The manufacturing industry has become so specialized that companies are looking for hyperspecific skills that few outside workers could be expected to have. But companies have also become less likely to offer training for new hires. I would argue that it's not specific to manufacturing. This sounds pretty similar to a phenomenon found in software development. Sometimes the principal developer on a project leaves the company and no one can read their code. Even if you match the laundry list of technology buzzwords perfectly, their code could just be unreadable. Going deeper, maybe the problem is even more general than that. If you have manufacturing equipment that no one in your company knows how to use, is that still considered capital? If so, what is that capital worth? What about code no one in the company understands? Patents? Excel spreadsheets? Is it still intellectual property? Interesting times are ahead.

75 points by _delirium 10y ago

> Companies, the authors write, “are unwilling or unable to solve their skill challenges through internal training, even for skills that are highly specific to a particular plant.” That's true for all companies. They don't want to spend the money to train, since employees can (and often do) leave after just a few years (if not months), but are also unwilling to make the workplace a more desirable one.

Bahamut 10y ago
It's pretty sad, as the solution is staring at them in the face. These are the companies who refuse to adapt.
- collyw 10y ago
  Sounds just like the IT industry.
- lj3 10y ago
  It's not that simple. The economic situation on the ground is that anybody making less than $70k a year is better off on welfare. Factory workers make less than half that. Who would willingly train to do a hard, monotonous job when they could sit on the couch doing nothing and get paid more?
  - rubidium 10y ago
    Reality check (no idea where you live... but your blithe statement reveals some serious lack of understanding of the situation of most people in the US): The U.S. Census Bureau reported in September 2014 that U.S. real (inflation adjusted) median household income was $51,939. Making $50k a year is WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY better than being on welfare.
    - mcguire 10y ago
      "...median household income..." That's also very likely two paychecks.
  - theandrewbailey 10y ago
    There are many places in the US where making $35,000/year would make you rich, or at least well-off and comfortable. Many of them don't want to live in metropolitan areas and are completely happy.
    - rubidium 10y ago
      As a single person, yes you can live very comfortably on 35k a year (I wouldn't quite go so far as "rich"). Raising a family, not so much.
maxxxxx 10y ago
I remember in the 90s you could walk into into an interview and they would say "You are a smart guy, you'll learn it". I got a C++ job based on the fact that I was really good with PL/1 and FORTRAN. No way you could do this today. People wouldn't switch jobs that much if they actually saw a path forward inside the company. Just give them a some raises and actually reward seniority. From my managers I sometimes get the sense that anybody who has worked under them for a few years is spoiled goods and needs to be replaced with fresh outside blood.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  I got my first job out of undergrad programming device drivers, having never programmed a single device driver before in my life. I skimmed whatever the 90's version of "Device Driver Programming for Dummies" was, on the flight to the interview. That scenario must seem ludicrous to job applicants today. Today, unless I had 5 years experience programming device drivers and could traverse a binary tree on a whiteboard, I wouldn't have the slightest chance at such an entry level programming job.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    I got a job that involves writing device drivers just last year. Our firm's only technical interview question involves time-space tradeoffs in embedded systems. Meh.
gregpilling 10y ago
it is not true for all companies. It doesn't take much thinking to realize that if you are a business owner, running a factory, and your competitors factory doesn't train then you would have an advantage by training. We do lots of training, because nobody has the skills for our exact setup. I have paid for plenty of training that walked out the door into a new job 6 months later. Life goes on. I look for high intelligence people, and then train them in house. High intelligence people can get trained in a fraction of the time, and not every high intelligence person went to college to become a programmer. I think the skills gap could be more about the draining of intelligent people from blue collar jobs. I went to high school in the 80's and there was a very strong push for "college/computers good, working with hands bad" message from the guidance counselors. I have a person who just graduated from University with good grades in Psychology and English. She applied for 87 jobs from March to July with no luck; now she is one of the robot operators. She says she makes more money doing this than any job she could get with her degree. Perhaps some of the skills challenge is too many white collar path people, not wanting to go to manufacturing for any reason. (my good worker is heading to grad school in a few months though, sad for me).
- r_smart 10y ago
  This is an interesting point. I used to have one of these blue collar jobs (several actually), and you're pretty spot on. In addition to the disdain for this kind of work, there seems to have also been a shift to an idea of wanting to derive fulfillment from work. That seems obviously good, but my experience, working in a factory was in some ways more fulfilling. The work itself was not terribly demanding, and so I could do a good job while not tying up much of my mental resources. This left my mind free to wander, and I would write stories, review music theory, and otherwise ponder life's mysteries while performing my various functions. Then, when I got home I was well equipped with ideas and still had plenty of energy to dedicate towards my more intellectually demanding hobbies. I'm not saying it was heaven on earth or anything, but it offered a certain satisfying simplicity, and made self-actualization easier outside of work. Nowadays, I get home and struggle to find mental energy for side projects or writing. The work is better, and I'm wealthier, but I'm not sure that my life is richer.

taneq 10y ago

> The manufacturing industry has become so specialized that companies are looking for hyperspecific skills that few outside workers could be expected to have. I've seen this in action. A company hires someone, that person bounces around the company picking up various skills, roles and responsibilities. Time passes, that person leaves the company, and the company looks for a replacement, completely ignoring the fact that the role and the employee who filled it grew organically together over the years, making it impossible to find a drop-in replacement. They then complain that there's a skills shortage because none of the electrical engineers applying for the position are proficient with both graphic design in Corel Draw, and operating the shop's CNC lathe.

larrydag 10y ago
ITT closing down doesn't help. There definitely seems like a need to fill technical certifications.
- mox1 10y ago
  The article talks about this, and claims that most of these jobs don't require certifications. They basically require plant specific on the job training, which for whatever reason companies aren't providing. It's similar to the tech industry where jobs ask for 10 years of node.js experience, 15 years of Coffeescript and advanced linux kernel knowledge....If you need that person, your going to have to train him.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Which ITT certificates are difficult to find at other schools? (Like community colleges and so on)
badsock 10y ago
I remember the 90s, when it seemed like every time a CEO announced a big layoff, their company's stock price would jump. It struck me at the time as being fetishistic - it didn't seem based in the reality of the company's situation, it was just a way to demonstrate a machismo that everyone had decided was a sign of good leadership. It was when the term "right-sizing" was coined, and Al "Chainsaw" Dunlap was the model CEO. It felt like it was a breaking of a social contract: that a company would use their coffers rather than payroll cuts to ride out bad times, and you stuck around for at least 5 to 10 years, maybe your whole career. Then it became clear that they were more than happy to lay you off if it gained the company even a small temporary advantage. Fast forward to now, when it's understood that if you stay somewhere more than 2 years, you're harming your earning potential. And at the same time companies complain that by the time they train someone up, they're out the door. Well, you reap what you sow. I clearly remember that employers were the first ones to drop their side of the deal.

FussyZeus 10y ago

We have more than a few factories in our area offering barely $40k for incredibly specific skillsets involving various types of machines, totally unwilling to train. This is actually a really good explanation for how so much of the technology in the Warhammer 40k universe is unknown and worshipped; nobody was willing to train anyone on how it worked.

r_smart 10y ago
On topic: $40k seems pretty decent for an operator, though with training. Off topic: I'm still new to WH40k (started running a Rogue Trader game), but my impression is that the tech ignorance was a mixture of a psuedo-religious cult seizing control, information lost in the many wars, and the intentional intellectual poverty of the populace that keeps them docile.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  > On topic: $40k seems pretty decent for an operator, though with training. Depends. Any mention of a dollar figure must include the region in the US, or it's totally meaningless. A 40K salary could easily be really good, really bad or normal.
  - r_smart 10y ago
    Yeah, I realized that after I posted my comment, and should have probably gone back to edit it. Thanks for pointing it out.
  - FussyZeus 10y ago
    That's true and even I don't have a point of reference as it's not my industry, it's just a regular feature of our local papers to have the local businessmen complaining about the lack of workers. I checked out the job listings out of curiosity. Whatever the case, apparently it's not enough since they can't attract people who are willing to work for that wage.
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
If we're comparing our own training and education systems to the Cult Mechanicum, then I think we need to train everyone to a higher level in everything. In fact, more radically, we need to reform intellectual property law in a way that incentivizes making institutional knowledge into publicly recorded knowledge.

danvoell 10y ago

The biggest "gap" in manufacturing is the wages gap. Most new jobs in manufacturing require less skills than a Walmart greeter. They either stand around and press a button or stand around and pull a piece of plastic off a part. Manufacturers aren't willing to pay much more than $MinimumWage per hour for this job. The people who apply for these jobs are just a revolving door that cycle through all the local manufacturers once they get bored. And then manufacturers complain because they can't find someone who wants minimum wage and wants to press a button for the next 30 years and is dependable. They cite "work ethic". Technology and capitalism are the only one's we can blame in this situation.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
djschnei 10y ago
"Blame technology and capitalism"? Are you advocating that a higher minimum wage would fix this? How exactly would pricing labor above it's actual value cause MORE of it?
- dpritchett 10y ago
  If these manufactured products can't be brought to market without the button pushers, the value of the button pushing is almost certainly higher than minimum wage.
  - r_smart 10y ago
    In which case the minimum wage is unnecessary. I had one of these button pushing jobs (well it was more complicated than that, but still not demanding), and was paid well above minimum wage.
    - djschnei 10y ago
      Exactly where I was going to go. Economies are about allocation of finite resources (labor being one of those). If a company is so poorly ran that it can't determine the correct price it's willing to pay for labor through cost-benefit analysis, I'd rather it not exist. Politically, we have a thing for making it harder for bad companies to fail.

Manupok 10y ago

You would think it would be the manufacturing plant that’s off by itself in the middle of nowhere that doesn’t have access to a pool of skilled labor — but it didn’t turn out that way.

a_thro_away 10y ago

Programming machines. Recently a factory robot crushed a woman against a wall when she entered its work space. A closed casket funeral. If there is a need to program a machine, who is responsible if there is a safety issue involved? or even identifying there is one? The factory worker only trained to program? The supervisor, with infamous pressure to get and keep production running?... BTW, according to CBS, State regulators suggested a $7000 fine(!!!), and said a lockout device could have stopped it.

gregpilling 10y ago
I own a factory robot welding cell. It has triple redundant safety systems. To make it operate while human accessible, you have to activate the safety interlocks on both doors, pull the triggers halfway (but not all the way) on the teach pendant, and then the machine will only move at 10% speed. Even at 10% speed, if the robot turns and the cabling on it swings around, it can give you a good hit (from the welding cable on top). Would not be fatal, but it does give you a good whack on the head (I have experienced this!! haha). Also, machine operating and machine programming are totally separate jobs. Programming is very high skill level, and operating is fairly low - my 9 year old son and his scout troop spent one night operating it to get their robot badge. Why did the woman enter the work space, and how did she turn off all the safety devices? That would take a fair amount of effort on my machine, to get inside it while it runs. It could be done if you really tried, but it would take some effort. As for training - nobody, and I mean NOBODY, has had the skill or training to operate that robot in the 9 years I have owned it. The operators were all trained by me, the factory owner. And while I have lots of pressure on me for production, an industrial accident will destroy that. Better safe than shut down by OSHA.
- a_thro_away 10y ago
  I understand the separation of programming and operating, as I am a programmer as well as having studied automated automotive valve welding and grinding at a leading supplier (friction stem and seat welding, among others). The point I was making, though probably not clear I admit, was that a factory operator could be seen as a "machine programmer" simply because they were given that title by the production owners, and trained on the job as such. For example, technicians regularly do electrician functions in large factories, and all safety and liability issues that arise with that. And, not all factory robots are contained in an enclosure, they are in free 3D space; what interlock would you suggest to keep a human out? Visual, ultrasonic? I simply ask who takes responsibility for general machine programming Safety if there is not a simple enclosure interlock situation? BTW, she didn't get by an interlock; apparently there was not one there - which is my point exactly. BTW, a previous fatal incident the proposed fine was <$100k, not a shut down - that doesn't seem much of a disincentive to me.

randomgyatwork 10y ago

It seems like what they really want is someone with twice the skills for half the pay. My friend's dad always told me it was hard to find people to hire, but he also said to hire someone he'd need to be able to make 3x what they cost to keep around.

gregpilling 10y ago
3x is the low end. I try to keep my factory at 6x . When you try to run at 3x, then you may drift down to 2x or less. If you aim for 6x, then you survive fine when it drifts down to 4x, and you are doing great when it goes up to 10x. I think that people who aren't employers can lose sight of the fact that some people are actually worth negative money per hour. Some people, even at $8.05 per hour, are not worth even that. Others, like the mythical 10x programmer, are worth 10x the high wage you pay them (or more). A huge variation. Example. Joe makes $8.05 sweeping the floor. Joe is not very diligent with his work, and sweeps some aluminum dust and debris into a pile of iron dust and debris, accidentally creates thermite and sets the corner of the factory on fire. This now costs in one day what Joe would have made in a year (this actually happened to me, last month. Thanks Bryan for putting it out). Example 2 (another true story! a good friend's company) Roy is drilling holes in a hydraulic press, actually in a dozen hydraulic presses that are all sold and need to ship. He breaks the 1" drill bit he is using, and undaunted and unwilling to tell anyone, he replaces the 1" bit with a smaller 15/16" bit and continues drilling. The presses ship out, all 12 of them, very heavy and with high shipping costs ($800 for the press and $200 for the shipping), and they get delivered to the customers. Yay! A hard busy week, but it all went out! Yay! bonuses for everyone! Then next week the phone starts ringing and it is discovered that all 12 presses are not unusable - the hole is too small to fit the piece that goes into it. All 12 presses come back, shipping borne both ways by manufacturer, and the presses are scrapped and replaced. Roy caused over $10,000 in losses for a very small company in exchange for the $300 dollars in pay. Roy was worth -$250 per hour that week. Negative $250 per hour. Of course we want twice the skills for half the pay. I would settle for twice the skills for twice the pay though. It is just so hard to find the "twice the skills" part. I would be delighted to find 1x the skills, even that is hard. When you find the person with 10x the skills, I recommend making it so they never want to leave. Equity in the company (or a cage of some kind in the basement, LOL)

davidf18 10y ago

If this article is correct, if firms aren't flexible enough to train workers with specific skills if they can't find anyone with that skill set that suggests that the firm is not filling jobs it needs and thus not as productive as it should be increasing shareholder value. That means that there is bad management and the board which represents shareholders should dump the current management and find management that is focused on doing what it takes legally to improve shareholder value.

jawbone3 10y ago
Why stop there? The only reason the board has accepted the bad managment is because the shareholders provide poor oversigth! The company should be confiscated and then sold at an auction to a select group of responsible shareholders!
Bartweiss 10y ago
Take the cynical view and recognize that this isn't a totally free market. Everyone has an incentive to kick back and let someone else solve the problem. Paying for training is usually a crappy deal, because someone else can use the same money to raise wages and steal your trained workers. You can address this with things like repayment-required contracts, but that's ugly and difficult for most jobs. Plus, you've got a better option: get it for free! So yes, you operate at slightly lower efficiency, but it's not because you're dumb. Instead, you're hoping that someone else (a competitor or ideally the government) will train up some employees you can then hire. Ideally, you get the government to push a career-training program in your desired field, producing a glut of specialized workers who not only don't need training, but keep wages down because they're only skilled in one specialized field. In which case, the management is perfectly sensible and 'sticky' wages in the face of a hiring gap make total sense.
- davidf18 10y ago
  Well, it makes the appearance that they are not employing and training people that are working to maximize shareholder value. The explanation that you present seems interesting but too complicated. If they lack employees and need to train them in order to improve productivity and thus shareholder value they should do this. I think there is a lack of transparency to shareholders that understand their management is lazy/incompetent. Also, in the article, it would be helpful to have the journalist interview some firms and ask them why they don't train people if they can't find them. Make it explicit.

mcguire 10y ago

"Another possibility is that what companies mean by an “opening” has changed — that in an age of online job listings, automated résumé screenings and increasing temporary and contract work, companies are posting more jobs than they ever expect to fill. There’s some evidence for this: Recruiting intensity — a measure of how hard companies are trying to fill open positions — remains below prerecession levels in both the manufacturing sector and the economy overall." That is an interesting theory. Unfortunately, the abstract of the referenced paper doesn't seem like the paper mentions much evidence. Also, my limited experience makes me doubt manufacturing companies are throwing out job openings willy-nilly, trolling for applicants. (In non-blue-collar jobs, sure.) On the other hand, the current environment would seem to make it easy to overestimate the number of openings.

Bartweiss 10y ago
My experience suggests that this theory is dead on. Less because companies are putting up more openings, and more because the meaning of "posting an opening" has changed in a way that causes overcounting. When Verizon wants a floor-sales clerk, they're likely putting the opening up on Monster, Indeed, and several other sites besides. That's 5-6 "openings posted" for one actual job, and it's made even worse if they aren't quick to take down the postings (why bother? you just route the resumes to spam). 30 years ago, you were posting a single job in specific places, and job boards or newspaper ads would turn over 'naturally' if you didn't keep the posting active. So I don't know how important it is, but I'm definitely assuming that postings are being multiply counted these days.
- wott 10y ago
  And what you mention is just a multiplication of posting of the same job post. But there is also the case that more and more work is subcontracted. So you can find posts that are slightly different but all refer to the same job position: 1 by the company where the job will take place, 4 by different subcontractors, and 3 more because 2 of the subcontractors have themselves subcontracted the job.
  - 10y ago

tboyd47 10y ago

> Weaver and Osterman offer a more industry-specific explanation: The manufacturing industry has become so specialized that companies are looking for hyperspecific skills that few outside workers could be expected to have. But companies have also become less likely to offer training for new hires. I would argue that it's not specific to manufacturing. This sounds pretty similar to a phenomenon found in software development. Sometimes the principal developer on a project leaves the company and no one can read their code. Even if you match the laundry list of technology buzzwords perfectly, their code could just be unreadable. Going deeper, maybe the problem is even more general than that. If you have manufacturing equipment that no one in your company knows how to use, is that still considered capital? If so, what is that capital worth? What about code no one in the company understands? Patents? Excel spreadsheets? Is it still intellectual property? Interesting times are ahead.